“Endogenous Property Rights and the Insurance-Efficiency Tradeoff: Evidence from the Mexican PROCEDE Ejidos Reform” (In progress)

Citation:

Carranza, Eliana. 2012. “Endogenous Property Rights and the Insurance-Efficiency Tradeoff: Evidence from the Mexican PROCEDE Ejidos Reform” (In progress).

Abstract:

Participation in the 1992 Mexican land-titling program PROCEDE allowed agricultural communities
(ejidos) to choose between communal certificates with usufruct rights and private individual titles
with full rights. The assumption motivating traditional land reforms and titling programs is that
individuals have greater incentives to operate under individual private ownership. However, the
variation in choice of tenure arrangements resulting from PROCEDE contests this view. I examine
how observed choices of common over individual tenure are motivated by a need to insure against
ecological shocks, how new technologies of production prompt changes in tenure arrangements, and
how household fertility responds to opportunities of risk-diversification offered by communal
arrangements. I am currently collecting land registry information and ejido census information,
including land parceling, population, infrastructure, production and assembly voting records for
more than thirty thousand ejido communities since 1935.